fantasy

The Caloric Kiss: A Pseudoscience Tryst (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 29 minutes)

A City’s Trance

Simon Nikolaus Nielson, who had grown fonder of all three of his names the more he saw them written in the papers, was not initially pleased to receive the invitation to the exclusive golfer’s club.  He’d never cared for the sport because he’d never cared for places that banned women.  How was anyone supposed to have any fun with scrawny boys chasing after their swings instead of a good woman?  Even when Simon did share an intimate moment with men it was only with the slimmest palest men who reminded him of a childhood friend that had died of consumption.

He checked his silver pocket watch and wondered how many holes he’d be expected to play before he could slip out.  He worried that a manageable nine, with one nonchalant comment, could turn into eighteen.  He’d already cancelled three hypnosis sessions to make room for those who had invited him.  Continue reading →

The Caloric Kiss: A Pseudoscience Tryst (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

(blurb)

Mankind has always had a lot of wrong ideas about science before stumbling to the truth, but there’s a place where many of the first guesses just happened to be right.  Welcome to an alternate early twentieth century where the Earth is flat, eyes see by emitting beams, caloric is the very stuff of heat, and bigfoot is our closest relative.

A plague of spontaneous human combustion has struck Two York City, and it’s up to an eclectic band of experienced scientists to find the cure and claim the glory before the charlatans and hucksters get to it first.

Join Rosamin the microscopist, Bill the meteorologist, Wallace the geo-engineer, and Janet the primatologist on their disastrous stumble through a hollow in the Earth, a backward swollen town of watermelon seed swallowers, and Transylvania: the technological capitol of the world.

There’s even more at stake than their fair city, for there’s a certain Modest Proposal that isn’t so satirical in this world of living pseudoscience.

(reading time: 1 hour, 17 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 10 hours, 33 minutes)

The Caloric Kiss

A Pseudoscience Tryst

by

Blaine Arcade

The Mechanical Vanian

Sparks popped and flew as raindrops touched the experimental wires.  Workers in wool shirts and suspenders struggled to throw blankets over the exposed sections of the cables, but backed off as if each spark was the swing of a lion’s paw.  Most of them hadn’t seen such complex electrical machinery in their lives.  The temporary system of wires and bulbs was commissioned specifically to light the World’s Fair and demonstrate the American bottling of lightning to the world.  Though the best meteorological authority in Second York had insisted there would be no rain during the first week of the fair, the thick oozing clouds overhead brought hours of evening drizzle anyway.  The fondness of the city pigeons for pecking tiny holes in the casing of the wires was not predicted either.  On a nearby brick wall a poster slowly dissolved in the rain.

Welcome to the 1903 Two York World’s Fair!  Incredible new science including the life-saving braking elevator and the mechanical Vanian!  New marvelous foods!  Have you tried spun sugar?  Festivities will continue into the night thanks to our stupendous electrical lighting with the power of alternating current! Continue reading →

The End Times were Published in 1979

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

A young lonely man distracts himself from his woes by collecting, hoarding in the eyes of others, vintage science fiction and fantasy publications, but there’s something moving around in his stacks, taunting him, demanding he reveal where he has hidden one very specific story…

(reading time: 1 hour, 7 minutes)

THE APOPALYPSE!

EVERY KERNEL A WEAPON OF INCREDIBLE POWER!

The world rejoiced when Dr. Kimberly Goldenrod invented Mannapop, her patented genetically-tinkered super corn that could grow in the harshest environments.  World hunger was all but solved as her genius took root across the globe and fed a generation.  Its kernels were as big as beach balls… and flavorful too!  The delicious miracle so distracted everyone that they didn’t notice it growing in every corner, every empty lot, every forest, and even between the kelp on the ocean floor. Continue reading →

Phages of the Free Radical

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

In a distant dimension where inner and outer space are one and the same, cell-like beings must abandon their lung-like planet before it is struck by wandering debris.  One among them is not what they seem, entranced by the dancing fluids inside each of them, hungry to understand it…

(reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)

I do not grant you permission to see this lightly, but I tire of your begging and pleading.  I have real work to do.  If you want to waste your time, go ahead; I won’t stop you.  I guess you’ve proven I can’t anyway.

Put it back when you’re done, as if nobody ever touched it. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 36 minutes)

A House-boat on the Styx

A protest raged outside the home of Bill Smithers.  A hundred boots stomped up and down on the sidewalk in rhythm.  Bottles, eggs, and fruit sailed over the hedges.  The crowd would’ve preferred rotten fruit, but when there’s an apple or a pear on your page it usually came out looking ready to sit in a bowl for a portrait instead of mushy and covered in maggots.  Cardboard signs waved in the air or hung around the neck by rope, their messages written sloppily in big splotchy swipes, which made it impossible to tell if they were written in haste or written with the ink from an open wound.  Everyone shouted the same sorts of things on the signs. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 3 minutes)

The Ticking Tunnel

Tick tock tick tuck tick teck tick tick tick tick tack.  Every other tick sounded a little bit different.  She was starting to hear variation in something mechanically identical and she knew it probably wasn’t the best sign for her sanity.  Tai Chen forced her eyes open.  She still couldn’t see anything.  Tickticktickticktickticktickticktick.  She hopped to her feet, banging her knees on a groaning pipe in the process.  Something fluttered against her nose.  She smacked herself in the face to stop it and came away with a note written on lined paper. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(reading time: 46 minutes)

The Ambulance Taxi

Carlo’s hospital was a small building combined with the local doctor’s office.  It had only three operating rooms.  People in Carlo, when they got sick, usually stayed home and let the webs take them over instead of troubling anyone for an aspirin.  There was no doctor on duty that day, just the nurse.  Even she was absent when Tai Chen awoke. Continue reading →

The Public Domain (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(blurb)

There’s a place, not much of one, where all the characters too old and insignificant to copyright wind up.  It’s a town fading into obscurvy, the disease of irrelevance, but Wai Tai Chen is still making a go of it.

She’s a tenner, meaning her name showed up in her original work ten times or less.  The reference page over her heart, all she got from her author, barely has any usable words.  She mostly winds up smacking people with fish.

Still, she tries her best and minds her own business, but all that changes when the copyright company comes to town, offering jobs that seem too good to be true.  All of the nobodies from the classics are falling for it, but not Tai Chen.  She begrudgingly investigates, finding questionable contracts, a few old flames, and murder.

(reading time: 54 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 25 minutes)

The Public Domain

by

Blaine Arcade

The sail-barrow bucked forward on the last concrete step, sending Tai Chen and her cargo spilling onto the sidewalk.  She hissed and swore, not at her ripped pants and skinned knees dripping black ink, but at the sight of the dented boxes and broken glass she was trying to deliver.  She grabbed her fisherman’s cap off the ground and tucked her short hair back under it. Continue reading →

Devilheart Diamond

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

The Krampus visited him once, as a boy, as a warning, so why would it return now, years later?  Why make an example of him at the most extravagant party he has ever attended, at the magnificent mansion of his long lost friend…

(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)

Devilheart Diamond

Nice

“Tell me how to say it again,” Archie Vinpipe pleaded, mostly to distract from the rattling of the dark carriage.  Nothing but a pair of lanterns illuminated the surrounding forest.  The moon was hidden by dark clouds that continued to pour snow as they had for nearly two days.  Their driver was only able to press forward because of the trail left by the other guests and the excellent breeding stock of the four reindeer pulling the vehicle.  The way the driver told it, they were no more than nine generations from Prancer himself and could, when properly motivated, run several inches off the ground. Continue reading →

Pop Goes the Shepherd

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

There are few jobs easier than being a shepherd in a carbonated world.  Sometimes sheep effervesce away with a pop! and vanish.  And sometimes new ones appear.  Everything was going well until that strange old man showed up.  Now he can’t stop popping in and out himself, off to strange places and lives he should probably steer clear of…

(reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)

Pop Goes the Shepherd

Ehmily of the Gonner House was supposed to be picking the blackberries as they reached their peak plumpness in those early summer months.  Instead she merely picked half of them and immediately consumed the other half as her reward.  She stopped briefly and took a seat in the lush grass just outside the castle grounds to contemplate how she would explain the half-empty basket to her handmaiden. Continue reading →